Questioning Romance: Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis
- Author/Editor
- Meecham-Jones, Simon
- Title
- Questioning Romance: Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis
- Published
- Meecham-Jones, Simon. "Questioning Romance: Amadas and Ydoine in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Parergon 17 (2000), pp. 35-49.
- Review
- Mid-way through his confession of his "Delicacy” in love, Amans describes to Genius how his ear is fed with “redinge of romance / Of Ydoine and of Amadas, / That whilom weren in mi cas” (6.878-80). The allusion itself, Meecham-Jones observes, might possibly be a parody of a conventional stylistic device of contemporary romance: both "Emare" and "Sir Degrevant" (both of which, he points out, may be too late to have been available to Gower) contain similar passing references to the story of Amadas. Meecham-Jones is more interested, however, in the purposes of Gower’s evocation of this particular story. It stands out as one of the very few references to popular romance in the poem, and the characters that Amans names are notably excluded from the ranks of the famous lovers who appear in Amans’ vision in Book 8. The implicit critique of the romance genre, Meecham-Jones asserts, goes beyond treating the reading of such books as an instance of Delicacy. Amans claims to seek consolation in characters whose condition resembles his own, but Amans does not get the happy ending that the romance provides. The difference in outcomes for Amadas and Amans reflects the difference between two different moral visions. The romance is structured to demonstrate “the benign justice of divine providence” (p. 47), while Gower’s moral analysis is based on “the congruence of act and consequence” (p. 46). “The operation of divine grace is necessarily absented from the exemplary discourse of Gower’s work . . . precisely because the opacity (to human reason) of the workings of grace is incompatible with the schematic and designedly practical dissection or moral possibility Gower attempts in the Confessio. . . . The story of Amadas is briefly introduced less to disparage its ethical stance than to assist Gower in defining, by contrary example, the particular moral stance of the Confessio as an exploration of human conduct in the fallen temporal sphere” (p. 46). It is at this point that the essay becomes interesting. Meecham-Jones makes a bit too much of the uniqueness of Amans’ allusion, passing over the references, for instance, to both Tristram and Lancelot elsewhere in the poem, including the vision in Book 8, where Meecham-Jones states that Gower deliberately omits any reference to the romance form (p. 41). The difference between a theology of grace and a morality of rewards and punishments would seem to be rather central, however. The question is how this distinction operates in the poem, and Meecham-Jones may define Gower’s position a bit too starkly. There are, after all, other very significant tales in which grace and Providence play a major role. Meecham-Jones dismisses “Apollonius of Tyre” from his discussion by classing it with “Florent” as “social narratives above all,” quoting Dimmick (see JGN 19, no. 2, p. 9), and he does not even mention “Constance.” Perhaps there is a bit more to say about this issue which Meecham-Jones poses so provocatively. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1.]
- Date
- 2000
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Confessio Amantis